I was looking at Jason Bay’s Baseball-Reference page the other day and thinking that he really isn’t as bad defensively as advertised. I was also thinking about writing about it today, but Mark Simon beat me to it, so just go read his.

It’s worth pointing out that Bay spent more of his career in PNC Park and then Fenway, two of the weirder left fields in baseball. PNC Park has an enormous left field, while Fenway has the monster. It wouldn’t surprise me if the defensive metrics had trouble figuring out Bay’s fielding in those two parks and he wasn’t nearly as bad as the numbers say. He certainly hasn’t looked — or rated — that bad with the Mets.

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2 responses to “Jason Bay’s Defense in Left”

I find the differences in the various defensive metrics to be amazing, specifically DRS and UZR. I realize UZR takes a least a season to stabilize, but for example Bay is +10 by DRS and 2.3 by UZR. Beltran is just about the same. Reyes on the other hand is -6 in DRS and +1 by UZR.

I really call into question DRS if it can have these kind of huge discrepancies.

I call all of them into question, really. I think they’re pretty good at giving an idea of who’s a good defender and who isn’t when you look at a huge number of games — like, a full career or a handful of seasons — but I’m not one to cite “9 runs saved this season” as though it’s a fact for the reasons you say above. UZR says one thing, DRS says another, Total Zone comes up with something else. They’re useful but not definitive.